Chapter 57

Chapter 57 An Archangel

FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs ofthe presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practicalnineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work.The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outsideaspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfortthat everywhere appear.

Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city;and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwardsin a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promisedso well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in thevery beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy.When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago,it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin,is getting ready to follow the former five into the river.Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It hadanother disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom,below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slopeof a hill.

In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town:and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellingsand lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings.And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and manyattractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges,some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with groundswhich occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand.There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts,is done on a great scale.

La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria;was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.

Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinaryyear there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful.Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers;they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left.Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated,was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the groundhad been sodded with greenbacks.

The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing witha healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which wewere sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced,not retrograded, in that respect.

A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long,three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Departmentusually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.The work cost four or five millions.

After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started upthe river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasionalloafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked ofwhen I lived there. This is what was said of him--

He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstonewith his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerceand the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in hisstudies by the hour, never changing his position except to drawin his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession.In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectualhand on it whenever it was wanted.

His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except thatthey were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and thereforemore extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice fromthe edifice itself.

He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the trainingof experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name wasa lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano doesnot need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen,Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean--

The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a greatmass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.A distinguished stranger was to address the house.After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity withsweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious.About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone,explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him,rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to makefor the stage and save his country.

Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody'seyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figureappeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present.It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks ofodd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a worldtoo short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest,also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linenbetween it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief,wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob-tailed blue coat,reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left fourinches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung ona corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravelyout upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front,where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word.The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a justaudible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the washof a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting.Another wave started--laughter, this time. It was followed by another,then a third--this last one boisterous.

And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap,tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation,nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering.The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivereda shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted.He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed tohis work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them;grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightningsand thunder--and now the house began to break into applause,to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on;unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering;presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside,firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vestafter the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there,like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes,raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth withintellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the madmultitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering backwith a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstormof waving handkerchiefs.

'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thoughthe was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thoughthe was an escaped archangel.'

Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city;and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city,with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factoriesof nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbidthe manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing,lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest,inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of eachand every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water.This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State;but not by the bench of Judges.

Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devicesfor right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department,a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employsthat relic of antiquity, the independent system.

In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathesa go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils.An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strongcontrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theatersin cities of Burlington's size.

We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylightview of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago,but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so Isuppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know.In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a lunaticwho caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracteda butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it,unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil.I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the onlymember of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him;he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the soleand only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot.It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thinglike that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and savedmy skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father;and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet.

And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets.I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them.They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it everyimaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicaciesof the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blindingpurple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye,but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippiregion has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle.It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so gooda right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine.I do not know.

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